Did something happen in the last week or so that made everyone lose their mind but me? Why in the name of all that is crap is everyone so intent on giving sloppy textual blowjobs to Paul Greengrass for The Bourne Whatever?
I'm at a loss. This movie has all the elements in it that movie critics love to turn up their snot crusted noses at: Plot free action, spazz-assed monkey editing, and shaky, shaky, shaky cam. But they make an exception for this piece of shit.
When I say shaky cam I mean shaky cam. This is cam that is as shaky as shaky can possibly be. Transformers looks like an oil painting compared to this movie. During most of this movie you can see nothing, literally NOTHING that is happening on screen.
Let me get a little more specific, here: They'll have a scene, like having the camera follow Matt Damon while he runs down a hall for example, where for a couple of seconds it just looks like the way a normal cameraman would hold a camera if he was running with it and wasn't a cartoon hunchback with two broken arms.
Then, all of a sudden, the camera will start to wobble from side to side for no reason whatsoever except to obscure the action that's going on. It's like someone was yelling at him "Hey, Camera Guy, I can see stuff on my monitor here! We gotta take care of that: Shake the camera like you have no idea how to use it!"
Then there's the action scenes which, apart from some bits where people type on computers and yell at maps on big-screen tvs, pretty much make up the whole movie. An action scene will start and the camera, which has been jittery up to this point, will literally have a conniption fit. Sometimes it's not even pointing in the right direction, we're just looking at a wall or a traffic light, or France or something. And when they do decide to bestow us with the fight scene or car chase we paid to see it's nothing but BLURS and SOUND EFFECTS! I might as well be watching a fucking RADIO PLAY!
It's not limited to the action scenes either: There's one conversation that's filmed over one guys shoulder at the guy who's talking. Gradually the camera tilts like it's slowly melting until nearly the whole screen except for one little corner in the upper left is filled with the shadow of the back of the guy's head.
Yet everyone loves it. They love it with waves of hyperarticulate critic love usually reserved for Very Important movies about England! And they're not just overlooking what I pointed out, they're saying that the fact that the action scenes are unintelligible visual mayonnaise is the BEST PART OF THE MOVIE! Go to Rotten Tomatoes and read some of the reviews. There are a few dissenting voices in there, but the vast majority might as well be accompanied by a picture of themselves naked and licking the poster. Such an image would not be inappropriate for any of the positive Bourne Whatever reviews. "He spends an entire fight scene filming the floor and parts of the bathtub? Badly? Genius! I pronounce him Best In Show!"
I thought action movies were in a bad way before, but if this shaky cam shit catches on, I don't know what's gonna happen to the genre. Between this, giant clashing army epics, and wire-fu it's getting so a brother can't watch a guy blow up a station wagon with a rocket launcher anymore. At least there's going to be a new version of "Commando" on DVD. Now there was an action movie.
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